Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - The Anti-Racists Have Become Racist - ZUBY | The TRUTH Podcast #40

00:00:00.000 The anti-racists have become racist. 0.99

00:00:01.000 The anti-fascists have become fascist and violent.

00:00:04.000 There's a reason we need to make that change.

00:00:06.000 We make it just incrementally.

00:00:07.000 The system is built to stop that incremental change in its tracks.

00:00:11.000 Don't let anybody hold you back.

00:00:12.000 Amen.

00:00:13.000 Just do it.

00:00:14.000 Presidential candidate Vivek Ramos.

00:00:18.000 We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.

00:00:22.000 Let's talk truth.

00:00:24.000 I'm here with Zuby.

00:00:27.000 We've been looking forward to this conversation.

00:00:29.000 I have been certainly for a while.

00:00:30.000 We sat down in Washington, D.C.

00:00:33.000 We happened to be at the same table at a dinner where we were both attending a conference, hit it off.

00:00:38.000 I had been familiar with some of his work before.

00:00:41.000 And after we hit it off, we said, you know what?

00:00:43.000 We got to sit down and have a longer form conversation than a passing dinner.

00:00:48.000 So here we are.

00:00:48.000 Welcome to Columbus, and thanks for joining us, man.

00:00:50.000 No doubt, man.

00:00:51.000 Happy to be here.

00:00:51.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:52.000 So we were starting to talk about your background, but I think it's interesting.

00:00:57.000 You're an immigrant, or you're from a family of immigrants.

00:01:01.000 That's similar to my experience as the kid of immigrants in the United States, but you were the kid of immigrants to the UK. Mm-hmm.

00:01:08.000 Tell me about that upbringing.

00:01:10.000 Yeah, sure thing, man.

00:01:11.000 So I was born in England.

00:01:13.000 I moved to Saudi Arabia as a baby.

00:01:15.000 Oh, really?

00:01:16.000 Yeah.

00:01:17.000 How old were you when you guys moved to Saudi?

00:01:19.000 Under one.

00:01:19.000 What took you there?

00:01:21.000 My dad's a medical doctor, so he got an opportunity to work out there, got a job offer.

00:01:26.000 He's an internist.

00:01:28.000 Internist general.

00:01:29.000 Internist, and he specializes in diabetes as well.

00:01:32.000 Okay.

00:01:32.000 So this is, you know, mid-80s, I guess 1987 or so.

00:01:38.000 I was born in 86. Whole family moves out.

00:01:40.000 I'm the youngest of five, so family of seven moves out to Saudi Arabia, which...

00:01:45.000 So all my earliest memories begin in Saudi Arabia.

00:01:48.000 Really?

00:01:48.000 Riyadh?

00:01:49.000 No, I grew up in, firstly, a place called Abkek and then a place called Yudalia, so on the east side.

00:01:54.000 On the east side?

00:01:55.000 The east side, yeah.

00:01:56.000 So the nearest big cities that people may have heard of would be like Dahran, Damam, Al-Khobar.

00:02:02.000 Those are some of the cities.

00:02:04.000 Giant cities that most people know.

00:02:04.000 Yeah, those are some of the biggest cities that some people might know.

00:02:06.000 Most people may not even know those cities.

00:02:08.000 But I wasn't like in Riyadh or Jeddah or anything like that.

00:02:11.000 And nowhere near the water?

00:02:13.000 Not too far.

00:02:14.000 Not too far.

00:02:16.000 About three hours from Bahrain driving.

00:02:17.000 Got it.

00:02:18.000 Yeah.

00:02:19.000 So where I grew up was an expat community.

00:02:22.000 So I grew up in an expat community surrounded by people from all over the world.

00:02:27.000 Various North America.

00:02:28.000 Was it pretty cloistered relative to being integrated in the rest of Saudi life?

00:02:32.000 Yes.

00:02:32.000 I see.

00:02:33.000 But you experience both because if you want to do anything interesting, if you want to go shopping, if you want to go out into the city, whatever, you know, you go into a real Saudi. 1.00

00:02:40.000 Because where I lived, it's, you know, there's one school, there's one store.

00:02:44.000 And it's dramatically different than the rest of Saudi. 0.74

00:02:45.000 Dude, it looks like, I mean, it's crazy.

00:02:48.000 I just came from Scottsdale.

00:02:49.000 Yep.

00:02:50.000 I flew in from Scottsdale yesterday, and when I was in Scottsdale, and even when I've been in certain parts of, like, Houston or Orange County, California, I'm like, this looks exactly like where I grew up.

00:02:58.000 Yeah.

00:02:58.000 So it just looks...

00:03:00.000 And this was in the 90s.

00:03:01.000 This, yeah, 80s, 90s, and I'm 37. 37. 37, yeah.

00:03:06.000 So, um...

00:03:07.000 Yeah, so I went through that.

00:03:08.000 Then I was in boarding school for seven years in the UK, university for another three.

00:03:13.000 And it was only in 2008 that we permanently left Saudi Arabia.

00:03:18.000 Yeah.

00:03:19.000 So I lived in the UK sort of consistently from 2008 on.

00:03:24.000 Just to dwell on the Saudi Arabia upbringing.

00:03:26.000 Sure.

00:03:29.000 I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about in this country, maybe a little bit more than I think we, you know, more airtime than we get use out of it for, but is the existence of racism in the United States.

00:03:43.000 Okay.

00:03:44.000 I'm curious about what that was like in Saudi Arabia.

00:03:47.000 I didn't even know what it was.

00:03:48.000 Really?

00:03:49.000 Never heard of it.

00:03:49.000 I didn't hear about racism at all until maybe I was about 9 or 10. It's not something I'd ever experienced, heard about.

00:04:00.000 I grew up in a truly multicultural place.

00:04:03.000 You're in an international enclave.

00:04:05.000 But one of the things you do hear a lot about, and I don't know if there's truth to this, but Is that places like Saudi Arabia or other countries in the Middle East have denigrating attitudes towards many of the African immigrants there?

00:04:19.000 It's not something you experienced at all?

00:04:21.000 No.

00:04:22.000 What I would say exists in Gulf countries, if anything, is passportism.

00:04:28.000 It's more like nationalism.

00:04:31.000 Literally, if you are an American or you're a Brit or you're an Australian or you're a Canadian and you hold that passport, regardless of your color, versus if you hold a Pakistani or Sri Lankan or Indian passport, that can affect even how much you get paid.

00:04:50.000 Social hierarchy there.

00:04:51.000 Yes, and even financially.

00:04:54.000 Financially, sure.

00:04:55.000 And is there a separate social hierarchy there, too, or it's more because of the financial?

00:04:59.000 You know, everyone will have a different experience.

00:05:01.000 It's not something I perceived.

00:05:03.000 Okay.

00:05:03.000 That passport...

00:05:07.000 Passportism.

00:05:08.000 It still exists in the UAE. It's still there.

00:05:10.000 I'm sure it's still there in Saudi and so on.

00:05:12.000 But it's based on nationality, not on skin color.

00:05:14.000 That's interesting.

00:05:15.000 And that makes sense to me, actually, now thinking about my limited time in those countries.

00:05:18.000 I think that's what you see is if you have a different color skin person, but from the UK or US, you're going to get a heightened treatment.

00:05:26.000 You or I would be treated very differently.

00:05:29.000 If I were a Nigerian with just a Nigerian passport, or you're an Indian with just an Indian passport versus you're an American or I'm a Brit, then there can be a difference in certain situations.

00:05:40.000 Got it.

00:05:40.000 That sounds about right to me, actually.

00:05:42.000 That makes sense.

00:05:43.000 So anyway, what got you into then your career of becoming a rapper, walking through the rest of what got you to the doorstep of doing what you're doing now?

00:05:50.000 Yeah, sure thing, man.

00:05:50.000 So I did very well in school.

00:05:52.000 I got into Oxford University.

00:05:53.000 I went there, studied computer science.

00:05:55.000 When I was in my first year of university...

00:05:57.000 Computer science?

00:05:58.000 Yeah, I'm a computer science graduate.

00:05:59.000 Oh, really?

00:05:59.000 I didn't know that.

00:05:59.000 All right.

00:06:00.000 Very interesting.

00:06:01.000 Did you finish in computer science too?

00:06:03.000 Yeah, I graduated.

00:06:04.000 You didn't switch majors?

00:06:04.000 Okay.

00:06:05.000 No, no, no.

00:06:05.000 I stuck with it.

00:06:07.000 So when I was in my first year of university, I started rapping just for fun.

00:06:11.000 I became a big fan of hip hop when I was in boarding school, you know, age of 11 or 12. And then all through my teen years, I was a massive, massive hip hop fan along with many of my friends.

00:06:21.000 And then I just started rapping when I was 18. Just started doing it for fun.

00:06:24.000 And I released my first album when I was 19. When you were 19?

00:06:28.000 Yeah, when I was still in university.

00:06:29.000 Good for you, man.

00:06:29.000 So, second year of university, I put out my first album.

00:06:31.000 It was called Commercial Underground.

00:06:33.000 Over the course of time, I ended up selling over 3,000 copies of that, just independently, hand-to-hand, just talking to people, promoting my stuff, you know, back on MySpace in the day, but mostly going out on the street and just talking to people and playing them my stuff and selling it to them.

00:06:46.000 So I graduated in 2007. I took one year out, did my music full-time for a year.

00:06:53.000 Then I moved to London, and I actually worked in the corporate world for three years.

00:06:56.000 I was a management consultant.

00:06:57.000 Not everybody knows this.

00:06:59.000 So 2008 to 2011, I was a management consultant whilst moonlighting as a rapper on the side.

00:07:06.000 Got it.

00:07:06.000 It's like a John Legend story here.

00:07:08.000 Exactly.

00:07:08.000 Yeah, because he was a consultant as well.

00:07:10.000 BCG. Yeah, BCG, I think.

00:07:12.000 So I was doing the two of them, and then 2011 comes, Both careers are progressing to a point where they're starting to conflict too much with each other.

00:07:21.000 Just from a time perspective.

00:07:23.000 Yeah, I need to be like, all right, which one of these am I going to do?

00:07:24.000 Not from any other perspective, just time.

00:07:26.000 Just time.

00:07:26.000 Yeah.

00:07:27.000 Time and, you know, commitment.

00:07:29.000 But it wasn't like when you say conflict with each other, it wasn't like you felt like your job as a management consultant made you less credible as a rapper or vice versa.

00:07:37.000 No, it wasn't a credibility thing, but it's a time and energy thing.

00:07:40.000 It's a time and energy thing.

00:07:42.000 Yeah, I get that.

00:07:42.000 And, you know, with these corporations as well, they kind of want to own you.

00:07:45.000 Right?

00:07:45.000 They don't really like someone pursuing a side hustle or another career outside of...

00:07:50.000 Well, especially in that business model, right?

00:07:53.000 Because the way it works is...

00:07:55.000 I mean, there's an arbitrage that these management consulting firms are playing.

00:07:59.000 It's like the investment banks that had an internship at Goldman and this and that, too.

00:08:04.000 Is you're getting people who are way more talented than what you're paying them, but what you're giving them in return is the prestige of saying, I work at...

00:08:14.000 Did you work at one of the...

00:08:16.000 I don't normally reveal it, actually.

00:08:18.000 I worked at Accenture.

00:08:20.000 Yeah, I worked at Accenture.

00:08:22.000 Yeah, I know.

00:08:22.000 I was just thinking, I was like, I don't think I've ever publicly said that.

00:08:24.000 Well, here you are.

00:08:25.000 So whatever, Accenture.

00:08:26.000 That you get that name brand, that's part of what you're getting for being somewhat undercompensated relative to the amount of work you're doing, right?

00:08:36.000 I mean, I think if you do the math, a lot of these consulting analysts, you probably know it well, might be paid less than somebody who's working in An ordinary service industry at a hotel or at a restaurant on a per hour basis.

00:08:48.000 But then if you've got your side hustle, that impedes the economics of squeezing out the number of hours out of you.

00:08:57.000 So that doesn't surprise me.

00:08:58.000 I've seen that firsthand.

00:09:00.000 It's not a career that's made for that.

00:09:01.000 But not too many of the people who are in consulting have aspirations as rappers either.

00:09:08.000 And the thing is, people have to remember, is at this point, by the time I left that job, I had already released two albums and two EPs.

00:09:18.000 I had already built an audience of a few thousand people.

00:09:21.000 I'd sold over 5,000 albums independently.

00:09:24.000 So it wasn't like...

00:09:25.000 You're like early 20s.

00:09:26.000 Yeah.

00:09:26.000 I guess when I left my job, I would have been 23 or 24. So it was September 2011. So you're already selling...

00:09:34.000 You know, a not unrespectable number of records.

00:09:38.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:09:38.000 And that was doing it part-time.

00:09:40.000 Yeah.

00:09:41.000 So, beginning of 2011, I decided by the end of the year I'm going to be a full-time rapper.

00:09:45.000 Okay.

00:09:45.000 So I left my job.

00:09:46.000 That's 2011. Nice.

00:09:47.000 Yep.

00:09:47.000 So I left my job September, October 2011. I started my company, COM Entertainment.

00:09:52.000 And I just started hitting the road, man, for the next eight years.

00:09:55.000 I was just a road warrior, traveling all around the UK, you know, various parts of Europe.

00:10:00.000 Did you have somebody who was doing the production?

00:10:02.000 Me.

00:10:03.000 And it's all you.

00:10:03.000 Yeah, it still is.

00:10:04.000 And booking and everything else.

00:10:05.000 Yeah, it still is.

00:10:05.000 That's good.

00:10:06.000 That's the way to do it, actually, because then you have control over the chain.

00:10:09.000 Yeah.

00:10:10.000 And it's still just me.

00:10:11.000 A lot of people think I have some massive team behind me.

00:10:12.000 It's still me.

00:10:13.000 You don't have like a...

00:10:14.000 I still do all my own bookings.

00:10:15.000 One-man band.

00:10:16.000 I love that, literally.

00:10:17.000 Yeah, still.

00:10:19.000 And so, yeah, that's when the adventure just so from...

00:10:22.000 Yeah, anyone who knew me and found out about me in that period, they would have probably met me on the street or they would have just, you know, seen some of my social media or whatever.

00:10:30.000 I was just out there just selling CDs, talking to people, hundreds of thousands, traveling all over the place, like I still do, but on a smaller scale.

00:10:37.000 And then late 2018, early 2019, Early 2019, I was doing the last pop-up shop I ever did.

00:10:47.000 So I started doing pop-up shops around 2015. So I'd go in shopping malls and, you know, rent out those kiosks and I'd be selling my t-shirts, hats, hoodies, CDs, all my merchandise and everything.

00:10:57.000 I did that for several years.

00:10:58.000 That was my main source of income from 2014 until 2018. And then February 2019, I was doing the last pop-up shop I ever did in a city called Darby in the UK. And as I was standing at my store, it was like 9.30 a.m.

00:11:14.000 I'm just scrolling through Twitter as I do.

00:11:16.000 And I saw two different stories coming out of the U.S. of men beating women in their sports after identifying as women.

00:11:25.000 And I'm just like, this is goofy.

00:11:27.000 Like, I've seen this for the last couple of years.

00:11:28.000 I'd started seeing this really bubbling up 2015, 2016, but I'd never publicly said anything about it.

00:11:33.000 And out of curiosity, I was just like, I wonder what the British women's deadlift record is.

00:11:37.000 And so I searched it for my weight class, and I saw it was 215 kilos.

00:11:42.000 And my max...

00:11:43.000 Which is...

00:11:43.000 That's a serious amount of weight.

00:11:46.000 That's a good weight.

00:11:46.000 Yeah, it's over 500 pounds, but my PB was over 600. You had done 600 pounds?

00:11:51.000 Yeah, my PB is 275 kg, which is 606 pounds.

00:11:56.000 Sweet.

00:11:56.000 At an 84 kg body weight.

00:11:59.000 What is it in men's?

00:12:00.000 It can't be that much higher than that.

00:12:01.000 Oh, boy.

00:12:02.000 Men's is going to be 800 plus.

00:12:04.000 Oh, it's going to be 800 plus.

00:12:04.000 In that weight class.

00:12:06.000 Total weight class.

00:12:07.000 The world record is over a thousand.

00:12:08.000 Yeah, but for you, I mean, how much do you weigh?

00:12:10.000 Like 70?

00:12:12.000 Yeah, at the time I would have been about 185. Yeah.

00:12:14.000 Okay.

00:12:15.000 All right.

00:12:15.000 Yeah.

00:12:15.000 So I already had a video on my phone from one of my training sessions of me pulling 230 kilos, which is more than the women's record.

00:12:23.000 So I was just on my phone.

00:12:24.000 I put out random tweets all day, every day.

00:12:26.000 I've been doing this for well over a decade.

00:12:28.000 And I just tweeted, I keep hearing about how biological men have no strength advantage over women in 2019. So watch me destroy the British women's deadlift record without trying.

00:12:37.000 P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight.

00:12:39.000 Don't be a bigot.

00:12:40.000 And you just posted the video?

00:12:41.000 I just posted it.

00:12:42.000 Nine-second video of me doing this deadlift.

00:12:44.000 At the time, I had 19,000 followers on Twitter.

00:12:46.000 So this is February 2019. Vivek, within 10 seconds, I was like, something is happening.

00:12:55.000 I don't know what's going on.

00:12:56.000 Within 15 minutes, the video had 10,000 views.

00:12:59.000 20, 50, 100,000, 200,000.

00:13:02.000 By the time I go to bed that night, 300,000.

00:13:04.000 I wake up in the morning, half a million.

00:13:05.000 Hits a million later in the day, 2 million, 3...

00:13:07.000 I was...

00:13:08.000 I didn't know what was going...

00:13:10.000 I don't know what...

00:13:12.000 Glitch I put into the Matrix, right?

00:13:14.000 But this thing went bananas. 0.91

00:13:16.000 For weeks and weeks and weeks, this thing was just going viral.

00:13:20.000 I started getting contacted by various media channels, BBC, Sky News, Fox News out in the US. You have to remember, I'm just a rapper, independent rapper in the UK at this time.

00:13:28.000 No one in the USA had heard of me.

00:13:30.000 I'm starting getting shared from now, you know, Candace Owens reaches out.

00:13:34.000 Ben Shapiro reaches out.

00:13:35.000 This, this.

00:13:35.000 Piers Morgan.

00:13:37.000 A couple weeks later, I wake up one morning and my phone's going crazy.

00:13:40.000 A couple weeks later?

00:13:42.000 Yeah.

00:13:42.000 Everyone's like, yo, Joe Rogan just mentioned you on his podcast.

00:13:44.000 Joe Rogan, Joe.

00:13:45.000 I'm like, wait, what's happening?

00:13:47.000 And then I listen to his recent episode and he's done a whole segment.

00:13:51.000 Covering my tweet, shouting me out.

00:13:53.000 He starts following me on Twitter.

00:13:54.000 He sent me a DM just saying, dude, this is one of the funniest things I've seen.

00:13:57.000 And then fast forward a couple months, I just keep this ball rolling.

00:14:01.000 During this time period, I'm gaining like a thousand followers a day.

00:14:04.000 So I've gone from, you know, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, just going up.

00:14:07.000 And then in July or August, Dave Rubin reached out to me and was like, hey, I'd love to invite you to the Rubin Report.

00:14:15.000 We've got a studio out and they were in Los Angeles at the time.

00:14:18.000 And so I was like, cool, I'm going to LA for the first time.

00:14:20.000 So I went to LA September 2019 and Joe Rogan was also in LA. So I DM Joe Rogan and was like, hey man, I'm a big fan of your podcast.

00:14:28.000 I'd love to be on it.

00:14:29.000 If there's an opportunity, I'm coming to LA. And he was like, Hell yeah, absolutely.

00:14:34.000 He's in Texas now, but in 2019, they were all in L.A. So I go to L.A. for the very first time.

00:14:41.000 I thought I was going to be in the U.S. for about two weeks.

00:14:43.000 I ended up staying three months.

00:14:45.000 The very first week, I land in L.A., First day I'm there, Dave Rubin interview.

00:14:50.000 Second day, Joe Rogan experience.

00:14:52.000 Then the Daily Wire reach out.

00:14:53.000 Ben Shapiro's like, hey man, we'd love to have you on the Sunday special.

00:14:58.000 So I go out, I record with Ben Shapiro.

00:15:00.000 And it just goes crazy.

00:15:01.000 I get invited out to the Blaze to record with, you know, Glenn Beck and Chad Prather and Sara Gonzalez, all those guys.

00:15:06.000 I end up in D.C. I get invited to the White House.

00:15:09.000 I get invited to the Pentagon.

00:15:10.000 Like, it was crazy.

00:15:12.000 It is all on the back of this.

00:15:15.000 Well, that was the flashpoint.

00:15:17.000 But once I had the chance to go...

00:15:19.000 What was your message on the back of that?

00:15:21.000 It's the same thing.

00:15:22.000 So, my message hasn't changed throughout my whole career since I put out my first album.

00:15:28.000 My message is about truth, about positivity, about trying to be the best human being that you can be.

00:15:36.000 So much of hip-hop is denigrating and it's negative and it pushes a lot of bad values.

00:15:41.000 I've always put out positive music that's designed to inspire and uplift people.

00:15:46.000 And a lot of people just got the chance to discover me.

00:15:49.000 So what happened was it wasn't just the tweet went viral, but I went viral.

00:15:53.000 Right?

00:15:53.000 So all this happened four and a half years ago at this point, but it allowed me to just introduce my personality and my views and everything to other people.

00:16:01.000 So a lot of people were like, oh, cool, came for the deadlift, stayed for everything else, right?

00:16:07.000 From the music to just listening to me speak, to me sharing my ideas.

00:16:11.000 So people very quickly realized, oh, okay, this isn't just like a flash in a pan.

00:16:14.000 This guy's actually very interesting.

00:16:16.000 Oh, Born in England, grew up in Saudi Arabia, Nigerian background.

00:16:20.000 He's got these interesting views on society and culture and politics, all this.

00:16:23.000 So that was the year where I really went from being just a rapper to being somewhat of a social commentator.

00:16:31.000 I started my own podcast that same year, put out my first book that same year.

00:16:34.000 And from that point onward, obviously there's a whole decade plus before that, which I've explained some to you.

00:16:42.000 But from that point onward, the trajectory has just been flying upwards.

00:16:46.000 How have your views changed over the course of this journey?

00:16:51.000 I'm sure you've been challenged from multiple different angles.

00:16:55.000 You also started as a relatively young person.

00:16:57.000 It's probably unusual to have your full worldview baked at the age of 23. Yeah.

00:17:03.000 Fifteen years in, I mean, how have you evolved?

00:17:06.000 Yeah, it's a good question.

00:17:07.000 It hasn't changed as much.

00:17:09.000 That trip to the U.S., how old were you when that thing blew up?

00:17:10.000 That was 2019, so I would have been...

00:17:12.000 Four years ago.

00:17:14.000 Yeah, like 32, 33. Like, maybe since you got started, but even over the last four years, how have your views evolved on some of these questions?

00:17:21.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the specific issue.

00:17:24.000 I would say it hasn't changed, certainly in terms of my principles and values, they've been very consistent.

00:17:28.000 They've been very consistent.

00:17:29.000 All that's happened is more people are hearing them.

00:17:32.000 And a lot of these ideas, you know, as a musician, I never really wanted to put out my thoughts and ideas too much about, you know, certain cultural issues or let alone politics and things like that, right?

00:17:45.000 I didn't want to rock the boat or polarize my own audience or...

00:17:49.000 And I also just didn't feel much of a compulsion to.

00:17:52.000 And then somewhere around 2016, 2015, I find was like a massive turning point in the West.

00:18:01.000 I think there have been many turning points.

00:18:03.000 I think 2001 was a big turning point.

00:18:06.000 I think around 2015, 2016 was a big turning point.

00:18:11.000 I'm sure there have been others.

00:18:11.000 Some people will go back to 1971, so on.

00:18:13.000 Stuff that happened before we were even born.

00:18:15.000 What happened in 2016?

00:18:16.000 I'd say 2015. Yeah, 2015. 2015 was the mainstreaming of wokeness.

00:18:22.000 Yeah.

00:18:23.000 2015 was the mainstreaming of transgenderism and all of that.

00:18:27.000 And also, I think, the rise of Donald Trump as a backlash to much of what that establishment was kind of coming to a head.

00:18:33.000 In the U.K., there was Brexit.

00:18:35.000 Brexit, absolutely.

00:18:36.000 In the U.S., there was Trump.

00:18:37.000 Right around 2016, right?

00:18:38.000 2016. They happened around the same time.

00:18:40.000 So all the stuff that Americans went through We're good to go.

00:19:05.000 All of these conversations are now happening.

00:19:08.000 That's also why my deadlift went so crazy, because I was one of the few...

00:19:11.000 I was like one of the first people with a significant platform who just kind of skewered that whole idea.

00:19:19.000 Because when I tweeted that, the idea of men identifying as women, competing in the sports...

00:19:23.000 If you go back to the beginning of 2019, people weren't really talking about that.

00:19:27.000 Some people had some awareness, but if you spoke to the average person, they'd be like, that's not happening.

00:19:31.000 What are you talking about?

00:19:32.000 Four years later, five years later, it's a big conversation.

00:19:36.000 So it just kind of like captured the imagination, not just in my country, but all over the place.

00:19:42.000 But coming back to your original question, I'd say that over the course of time, my views have simply become more refined.

00:19:50.000 I'd say from a political perspective, they've become...

00:19:54.000 I guess I've become more libertarian on certain things whilst becoming more conservative on some other aspects.

00:20:01.000 But I haven't had a big shift, and I'm not someone who has a story of like, oh, you know, I used to be a lefty and then, you know, I found...

00:20:07.000 What's the difference between libertarianism and conservatism to you?

00:20:11.000 That's a fantastic question.

00:20:13.000 I think about it a lot.

00:20:14.000 Yeah, that is a good question.

00:20:16.000 I think it mostly comes down to There are some differences in what should be done, but I think a lot of the differences are in who should do them and what should the size and scope and role of the government be.

00:20:32.000 Give some examples.

00:20:33.000 I'd say an example is, okay, viewpoints on drug policy.

00:20:38.000 I'd say that's an obvious one where there's a difference between traditional libertarian perspective and conservative.

00:20:44.000 That's an easy one.

00:20:46.000 That's an obvious one.

00:20:47.000 I'd say the general size and scope of the government.

00:20:52.000 How big should that even be?

00:20:54.000 And what are the things they should and shouldn't get involved with?

00:20:57.000 Libertarians are generally going to be more hands-off.

00:20:59.000 More traditional conservatives are going to be like, no, these are certain things that there should be laws around and the government should get involved in.

00:21:06.000 See, it's interesting you say that.

00:21:07.000 I think I sit somewhere between the two.

00:21:08.000 I think the conservative movement is now—maybe you and I are similar in this respect.

00:21:13.000 Maybe there's some differences, too.

00:21:16.000 I think the conservative movement is at a crossroads right now of defining, at least in the United States, what it actually means to be a conservative in the year 2023. I personally would like to see not a ton of daylight between the government's role,

00:21:32.000 certainly at the federal level, between what a libertarian would want and what a true conservative would want in terms of dismantling an administrative state that really is the source of most of the federal governmental control over our lives.

00:21:47.000 But my reason for calling myself a conservative rather than a libertarian is really twofold.

00:21:54.000 One is I think that a lot of libertarians don't really walk the walk fully when it comes to being libertarian.

00:22:02.000 So they'll criticize, say, a conservative proposal to say that businesses shouldn't be able to discriminate between viewpoints, fire somebody for saying the wrong thing.

00:22:11.000 But they're perfectly fine with still the other protected classes of race and gender and sexual orientation and religion and national origin.

00:22:20.000 I know a lot of libertarians who are happy to blow that all up.

00:22:23.000 Well, that'd be a true libertarian, but you don't see that even amongst the libertarians who actually wield any modicum of political power.

00:22:30.000 Once they get there, they've become...

00:22:32.000 You won't find somebody who, even with libertarian leaning, who takes up the issue of saying that we need to rescind protected classes.

00:22:39.000 And so that was sort of an internal frustration of libertarianism for me.

00:22:42.000 It also just wouldn't be a popular point.

00:22:44.000 I think the hard thing...

00:22:45.000 I'm not sure it wouldn't be popular.

00:22:46.000 Actually, if you were willing to make the case.

00:22:50.000 See, the problem is whether or not something's popular is whether or not you're actually able to have the open debate to make the case.

00:22:55.000 I think it's such an easy...

00:22:59.000 The thing with that position is it requires a lot of explanation.

00:23:03.000 Yeah, and the old adage in politics, if you're explaining, you're losing.

00:23:06.000 Yeah, I just think if someone came out and they said that they wanted to repeal or roll back certain protections and anti-discriminatory policies, that is such an easy position to...

00:23:20.000 It's absolutely skewed.

00:23:22.000 Yeah, exactly, right?

00:23:22.000 Because it just sounds like they want to do a wicked thing.

00:23:25.000 Oh, you want people to be able to discriminate and be racist and be sexist and be homophobic?

00:23:31.000 That's exactly how it would be framed.

00:23:32.000 Let's just talk about that for a second.

00:23:34.000 It was what I was planning to talk about with you, but why not?

00:23:36.000 Because people very rarely talk about this.

00:23:38.000 Let's get this straight.

00:23:39.000 Let's say you're a business that doesn't like, fill in the blank, Asian people, black people, Jewish people.

00:23:45.000 You're a business owner.

00:23:47.000 You operate a restaurant or...

00:23:49.000 A hotel or whatever.

00:23:52.000 So you're saying that I want the government to tell me that I have to bring that person in.

00:23:59.000 Think about who that's serving.

00:24:00.000 So now you're going to have a proprietor who is hostile to the people who are showing up, but we're making them do it anyway.

00:24:06.000 Who is that good for at a moment in our history?

00:24:10.000 Now, you could debate it in past moments in prior points in history, but at a moment in our history where 99.9% of good providers of goods and services do not have those biases, Shouldn't that person just be out-competed out of existence rather than having somebody who's Indian or black or Jewish or whatever walk into that proprietorship and say, whoa, I'm a little surprised this person doesn't like me.

00:24:36.000 I would rather than just put that sign up out on the front so I could go to the next place where there are plenty to choose from.

00:24:40.000 I'm saying this half-jokingly, but only half-jokingly.

00:24:44.000 I think that's a persuasive justification for a lot of people to say, hey, we don't live in a, well, I guess it's one of the questions on the table, systemically racist era.

00:24:54.000 I think we don't.

00:24:55.000 Well, this is part of the problem.

00:24:56.000 That's part of the problem.

00:24:57.000 If half the population does believe that.

00:24:58.000 I don't think half the population does.

00:24:59.000 I think it appears that half the population does, but it's really just 10% that wields a lot of power over the country.

00:25:05.000 I mean, you travel the country.

00:25:06.000 Do you think half the people at the level of individuals do or half the people on social media who make social media posts do?

00:25:12.000 I think half the people in the real world in the US would agree.

00:25:17.000 I mean, I haven't seen a poll on this explicitly, but I would not be surprised if 50% of people would believe that there is some form, in some way that there's some degree of institutional racism.

00:25:32.000 Same with sexism. 0.99

00:25:34.000 I'd say at least half the population would agree with that statement.

00:25:37.000 Yeah, I guess the path forward definitely changes depending on whether you're in your camp of believing that 50% of the country really believes in this modern critical theory, race, gender, sexuality, systemic inequity narrative.

00:25:50.000 I don't think you'd even have to go that far because people interpret that question differently.

00:25:55.000 It's weird.

00:25:56.000 I've had people ask me, do you believe in systemic racism or do you believe institutional racism exists and so on?

00:26:02.000 I'm not a huge fan, and I typically avoid using those terms.

00:26:05.000 Yeah, they're kind of hollow.

00:26:07.000 Yeah, they need to be more specific.

00:26:10.000 My answer to that is, well, what do you mean?

00:26:12.000 Yeah, it's a good question.

00:26:13.000 What do you mean?

00:26:14.000 Because there are some people who, if you say institutional or systemic racism, they think they include vestiges.

00:26:22.000 So those things absolutely 100% Totally existed through most of U.S. history.

00:26:27.000 Yeah, I got about it.

00:26:28.000 Very clear.

00:26:28.000 It's only in the 1960s.

00:26:30.000 Yeah, things changed.

00:26:31.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:26:32.000 So, and that has, and by the way, this is where I think conservatives can take some L's because I think too many conservatives are not willing to properly consider and explain and think about how those vestiges, how those policies that did exist for 100 plus years have an impact on individuals and communities Now, and there are some people who would call that institutional racism.

00:26:57.000 They don't mean that right now I can point to you a law in the books that's racist, but they're saying, look, there were all of these racist policies.

00:27:04.000 And so downstream of that, even though it's a few decades later, There's still a lasting impact and legacy from that.

00:27:12.000 But the question comes down to the prompt that got us on this is, do we believe we can trust the marketplace today to say that we don't have to ban an individual hotel owner from discriminating or not?

00:27:23.000 My personal answer is yes.

00:27:26.000 That we can trust the market to do that today.

00:27:28.000 Yes, I do.

00:27:29.000 I think so too.

00:27:30.000 I think that free market capitalism is one of the most truly anti-racist things that exists.

00:27:36.000 Yeah, of course.

00:27:37.000 Green is the color we really care about.

00:27:39.000 Yeah, if you want to be a massive bigot and you've got competitors, then you're going to get out-competed.

00:27:44.000 Get with the program.

00:27:45.000 Yeah, and unless you live in a very truly racist society, you're going to get out-competed, you're going to get put out of business because actually discriminating against people in an unfair way is a competitive disadvantage.

00:27:56.000 So I'm with you on that.

00:27:58.000 I just don't think that as a policy position, if someone came out and said, okay, we want to roll this back, we want to roll back the anti-discriminate nation policies, we want to roll back certain things that might come under the banner of civil rights, people are not going to like that.

00:28:13.000 Because you're not going to get the time to explain everything that We understand.

00:28:16.000 We've thought about this through, but most people have not.

00:28:18.000 They're just going to be like, wait, so you want to be able to discriminate against people by race and by ethnicity and by all that?

00:28:24.000 Like, no, I'm not with that.

00:28:25.000 And so most people would be against it.

00:28:27.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:28:28.000 Yeah.

00:28:29.000 I am...

00:28:31.000 I hope not naive about this, but I think that too often, one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, too often you have...

00:28:42.000 Political leaders, politicians, even just people in leadership positions outside of politics who view their job as to be a bean counter.

00:28:52.000 Micromanager.

00:28:53.000 Yeah, but even of the country, just to sort of say, hey, here's what people think, and so I'm going to shape what I say in the shadow of that.

00:29:04.000 And I think that gets backwards what the job of a leader is.

00:29:09.000 I mean, Thomas Sowell had this famous expression, you know, Thomas Sowell is...

00:29:13.000 Yeah, of course.

00:29:14.000 Yeah, he's...

00:29:15.000 I'm gonna get it approximately right, but he says something like, if you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.

00:29:22.000 If you care about yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

00:29:25.000 Yes.

00:29:25.000 And what I see in the landscape today is a bunch of leaders who tell people what they want to hear instead of telling them the truth.

00:29:34.000 Now, that's not because they're lying.

00:29:36.000 I think it's mostly because politicians, the class we've bred in the United States anyway, are mostly vessels.

00:29:43.000 They're like mirrors.

00:29:44.000 It's like holding a mirror up to somebody and saying that I want to reflect back to them what they're already sending into the mirror.

00:29:55.000 And I don't think that's useful.

00:29:57.000 I mean, my first reaction when I sometimes, not all my ideas poll well, and some of them still don't.

00:30:03.000 And that's okay, but my first reaction when I see that I mean, it's a rational reaction.

00:30:11.000 It could be this.

00:30:11.000 I'm not blaming people who feel this way.

00:30:13.000 Hey, I have this policy idea.

00:30:14.000 Let me put it out.

00:30:15.000 Let me pull it.

00:30:16.000 And then come back and see, oh, it wasn't particularly popular.

00:30:21.000 My reaction is not, oh, wait, let me figure out something else to say.

00:30:27.000 My reaction is, well, the first question is, am I sure I'm right about that?

00:30:31.000 Is that really my belief?

00:30:33.000 It's always a good thing to check.

00:30:34.000 Sometimes maybe you should change your own mind on some things, and it's good to be open-minded.

00:30:38.000 But assuming that's something that I really have conviction in, my real reaction is, okay, well then how do I persuade people?

00:30:44.000 I'm not doing a good enough job of persuading people of this is what people still think, and yet this is the fact of the matter, the truth of actually what ought to obtain.

00:30:55.000 Got my work cut out ahead of me.

00:30:57.000 So if we believe that truly we can leave it in this narrow case, and we could talk about this on anything, but leaving it to the market to decide what a business owner, who a business owner doesn't want to do business with, Then, if our problem is people aren't going to be convinced of that because that position can be easily caricatured, or, you know, I had a discussion the other day with somebody saying, well, that's going to be your problem when you get into D.C., when you say you want to shut down the FBI. I understand your logic for wanting to do it, that you have a clear, practical plan for doing it.

00:31:27.000 But they're going to tear you down based on the narrative that they spin up around it.

00:31:33.000 My view is that I need to do a better job.

00:31:35.000 That means I'm doing a pretty awful job of explaining why this is my position.

00:31:41.000 And I believe that human beings are not animals, that we're subject and open to persuasion.

00:31:46.000 Is that a naive view, do you think?

00:31:48.000 Or the unrealistic in the modern world versus the old world?

00:31:52.000 I mean, I hear you completely.

00:31:54.000 And I think it's difficult because even as a politician or I'd say even any type of leader, but especially when it comes to politics, you are simultaneously someone who has your own vision and ideas and policies.

00:32:11.000 But you're also a representative of a much larger population of people.

00:32:17.000 So there's certainly a line to be straddled between, both in terms of how you speak and in terms of policy, of giving people what they want and representing what they want, whilst also forming your own vision.

00:32:31.000 And I think a lot of this is also just, a lot of it is iterative, right?

00:32:36.000 Because you can have a goal, but sometimes if something moves too quickly, I think To their credit, I don't even like to use the term the left, but the left is very good at this.

00:32:45.000 They're very good at incrementally, incrementally realizing their vision, right?

00:32:51.000 Rather than just coming on day one and saying, okay, we want to just completely do this thing.

00:32:56.000 And then people have a massive reaction to it.

00:32:59.000 It's like, okay, just tweak that.

00:33:02.000 We want to tweak that.

00:33:04.000 And then there's a long-term vision.

00:33:05.000 So say for example, again, from even a conservative or libertarian perspective, I know many, many libertarians, even anarcho-capitalists, who are like, we just want to gut the entire thing, right?

00:33:15.000 Just blow up the entire...

00:33:17.000 Abolish the entire federal government, right? 0.59

00:33:20.000 We just need to get rid of it all, whatever.

00:33:21.000 And I'm like, okay, like, I can...

00:33:24.000 Whether or not I agree or disagree, I can understand that vision and sort of end point.

00:33:30.000 But if you come in on day one and it's just like, okay, all of these things that have existed your entire life and decades before, you know, I was even born, we want to kind of explode all that.

00:33:41.000 And it can be deemed too radical by people.

00:33:44.000 Well, this is a fun conversation because I think there's two things going on there.

00:33:48.000 So maybe we can click in a little deeper here.

00:33:52.000 I disagree that that's a desirable end point.

00:33:55.000 Okay.

00:33:56.000 Right.

00:33:57.000 I mean, maybe you agree, too.

00:33:58.000 I'm not an anarchist.

00:33:59.000 Yeah, I'm not an anarchist.

00:34:00.000 I believe that there are certain limited roles for a government to appropriately perform with the consent of the government under limited circumstances.

00:34:08.000 So there, like I think that you say anarcho-capitalist people say the whole thing.

00:34:15.000 The problem there isn't the stepwise progression to it.

00:34:19.000 It's that I don't think that that is a valid end.

00:34:21.000 I think it's both.

00:34:22.000 Well, it could be both.

00:34:23.000 But I think that...

00:34:24.000 Okay, let's say...

00:34:25.000 The question I'm isolating for, though, is one where...

00:34:27.000 So I at least reject the premise.

00:34:29.000 Sounds like you agree that it's a valid end. 0.97

00:34:30.000 Let's pick a valid end that is still drastically different from the status quo.

00:34:34.000 The question is the path to get there.

00:34:36.000 Let's say that the valid end is simply what conservatives say.

00:34:40.000 Smaller, limited government, right?

00:34:42.000 Because the government is not small, it's not limited.

00:34:45.000 It's gigantic.

00:34:46.000 The tentacles are everywhere.

00:34:47.000 I don't know how many alphabet agencies you guys have in this country.

00:34:49.000 Yeah, totally.

00:34:50.000 It's enormous, right?

00:34:51.000 It's enormous.

00:34:53.000 So even if the goal is that conservative approach of, okay, not abolishing the government, but reining it back, even to what it originally was supposed to be when the USA was founded, right?

00:35:04.000 The federal government, as far as I'm aware, as a Brit who has some awareness of this stuff, the federal government was never intended to be as large and overarching.

00:35:14.000 And powerful and complicated as it is in its current form.

00:35:17.000 So even most conservatives, I think all conservatives would say, yeah, the government needs to be trimmed down.

00:35:22.000 It needs to be cut down.

00:35:23.000 But the truth is, whether you've got a Democratic administration or Republican administration over the decades, it still just continued to grow.

00:35:31.000 The spending continues to grow.

00:35:33.000 All of that.

00:35:34.000 So if the goal is like, okay, we need to shrink down the scale, scope, and power of the federal government.

00:35:40.000 Massively shrink down, right.

00:35:41.000 Exactly.

00:35:41.000 So we can make that the end point.

00:35:42.000 Do you go in steps or do you go in quantum leaps?

00:35:44.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:46.000 And I can see pros and cons towards both approaches, but I think the more radical the approach, number one, the word radical scares people because people just get used to things.

00:35:55.000 I have an interesting point, by the way, which is, and this comes from my experience in dozens of different countries and just observing humans and I think the biggest conservative advantage...

00:36:06.000 I think there's two.

00:36:08.000 I think the two advantages that conservatives have, which they sort of underutilize in their messaging and narratives, is most people around the entire world, most people are pretty conservative.

00:36:21.000 There are more conservatives in this world, by far, than there are leftists or progressives or whatever.

00:36:27.000 Most people...

00:36:28.000 So even what I'm saying here, the reason why the incremental approach works better is because most people are inherently conservative.

00:36:35.000 Most people don't like massive, massive, very quick change in anything in their life.

00:36:39.000 Most people don't like that.

00:36:40.000 Most people have a fairly conservative approach to their life.

00:36:43.000 I think the second big advantage conservatives have, of course, is that the policies actually...

00:36:48.000 It works, right?

00:36:50.000 You don't need to indoctrinate people into certain values.

00:36:52.000 They work on their own merits.

00:36:53.000 They work on their own merits, right?

00:36:55.000 You don't need to put someone in a, you know, re-education camp of, you know, five years of university or brainwash them in school or whatever for them to come along to the principles, right?

00:37:05.000 You have to...

00:37:07.000 By default, most people would understand that, you know, something like the police makes sense to manage crime, or that there should be law and order, or most people should and want to get married and have children and have this whatever.

00:37:18.000 You have to, like, you have to indoctrinate people into ideas like abolish the police, abolish the family, disrupt the nuclear family.

00:37:24.000 Those are things you have to brainwash people into.

00:37:27.000 And progressives have been very successful in doing that, right?

00:37:31.000 Despite how poor and ill thought out many of these ideas are, they've managed to brainwash millions of people into them.

00:37:36.000 And I don't think conservatives are taking enough advantage of the fact they're like, look, we've actually got our ideas just make sense and they're more in tune with what's already in your brain and in your heart.

00:37:46.000 So how can we sell this message and vision better?

00:37:49.000 Which, by the way, to your credit, I think you are of all the people I see out there talking, I think you are doing this very well.

00:37:54.000 I think you're talking about many points that are just missing from these conversations.

00:37:59.000 I love that you talk about purpose.

00:38:00.000 I love that you talk about meaning.

00:38:01.000 I love that you talk about family and the importance of marriage and, you know, the things that people know But for whatever reason, again, maybe it comes back to the too much politicizing and polling and all this stuff.

00:38:14.000 People are kind of afraid to talk about these things that they just know to be fundamentally true, right?

00:38:21.000 It's so obvious to me as an outsider even.

00:38:24.000 It's a big problem in my country, but it's an even bigger one in the U.S. that absent fathers and broken homes are...

00:38:31.000 The, arguably the biggest problem in this country, right?

00:38:36.000 That's something America's number one at, that America should not want to be number one at.

00:38:39.000 And most people don't want to talk about that because it might upset people, it might trigger people, it might be.

00:38:44.000 It's a little uncomfortable to talk about the breakdown of marriage and high divorce rates and the huge numbers of children growing up without fathers and single motherhood.

00:38:55.000 It's not pleasant to talk about because we all know people who are coming from this or who are experiencing it and whatever.

00:39:01.000 But that needs to come into the conversation.

00:39:04.000 It needs to come into the conversation because it's, you know, it's massively important.

00:39:08.000 So, yeah, just to your credit, I love that you talk about the uncomfortable topics.

00:39:12.000 And I like that, you know, you go into the lion's den as well to do it.

00:39:14.000 You're not just sticking to the easy ones.

00:39:16.000 You're not running to lead a political party.

00:39:17.000 That would not be worth it.

00:39:19.000 You're running to lead a country.

00:39:21.000 You better be willing to talk to everybody, agree with you or not.

00:39:25.000 But it's so rare.

00:39:25.000 I'm listening to you speaking.

00:39:27.000 I think actually that's also one of the challenges that I think one of my challenges in determining whether or not I succeed in this Republican primary is going to come out, I was just jotting down some of the things you said, comes down to a tension between the values that I'm advocating for are deeply conservative values.

00:39:46.000 But my method of wanting to get there...

00:39:52.000 Is radical in terms of a quantum leap to a worthy destination, not abolishing the government, but abolishing a fourth branch of government where it ultimately exercises political power today.

00:40:04.000 And there's a tension in that.

00:40:06.000 And I see it in many of the Republican audiences that I talked to.

00:40:10.000 I saw it in the first debate and the response to it a little bit.

00:40:14.000 Is that the people who share the conservative value set that I share and I'm advocating for, it's in the name.

00:40:24.000 They want to conserve, right?

00:40:26.000 Whereas what I'm talking about is getting into some of these agencies and bureaucracies and even the swamp exists in the private sector to shut it down, not through incremental reform, but through a quantum leap of actually shutting it down.

00:40:40.000 And so that is, I think, a methodology that is inherently in tension with the people who want to conserve rather than drive radical change.

00:40:53.000 But my challenge back is what happens when the things that you want to conserve no longer exist?

00:41:05.000 And I think that that's something that we have Yes.

00:41:12.000 Actually, is the things that we want to conserve when they don't exist, then we have to actually create from the ground up.

00:41:23.000 And that takes a quantum leap to accomplish.

00:41:26.000 Do you know what I consider you?

00:41:28.000 I consider you a progressive conservative.

00:41:31.000 You know, it's funny you say that.

00:41:33.000 It's interesting.

00:41:34.000 Progressive in the methodology, maybe.

00:41:35.000 Yes, exactly.

00:41:36.000 But conservative in the content.

00:41:37.000 Because conservative can be...

00:41:40.000 Country to country, person to person.

00:41:42.000 Conservatism in the UK is very different to conservatism in the US, right?

00:41:46.000 And the battles are very different and the way people talk about things are very different.

00:41:51.000 But I think there's sort of two fundamentally different ways to understand conservatism.

00:41:57.000 I think your approach is almost looking back at what The principles the USA was originally founded upon, like those core ideas and values, and wanting to cut off the stuff that is not in line with that.

00:42:11.000 So again, it's like a libertarian approach.

00:42:13.000 It's leaning it all down and going back to the origination point.

00:42:19.000 Whereas for other people, conservatism means maintaining the status quo.

00:42:23.000 So that's the challenge you're describing.

00:42:25.000 So for people who want to maintain the status quo, even if it's not serving them well, even if some of these organizations are corrupted or they're not serving a purpose or they never really had one to begin with, they still in their mindset are very apprehensive.

00:42:40.000 About those things being shut down, especially when you use that like, you know, shut it down, right?

00:42:44.000 Or on the left side, you know, they're like abolish, you know, abolish this thing.

00:42:47.000 You know, dismantle this thing.

00:42:49.000 And it makes people go like, wait, wait, I'm used to this thing.

00:42:52.000 This has been here my whole life.

00:42:54.000 If you say, I want to shut down the FBI, I'm not even American.

00:42:57.000 But as far as I know, the FBI has like, it's existed my entire life.

00:43:01.000 This organization's always been there.

00:43:02.000 I assume it serves a valuable purpose.

00:43:05.000 Whatever, you know, people just get used to things.

00:43:07.000 And so, if someone says that, it's like, there's a natural reaction to it.

00:43:13.000 But, yeah, I think that's perhaps a battle that's going on even within conservatism itself.

00:43:18.000 You have the sort of conservative conservatives, and then you have more, like, progressive conservatives who are like, no, no, I want change, and I want massive change to achieve what conservatism was originally supposed to be.

00:43:33.000 Yeah.

00:43:35.000 And that's...

00:43:39.000 A challenge.

00:43:40.000 It's an inherent challenge.

00:43:41.000 But I think that my view is we're not going to get to that destination incrementally.

00:43:51.000 Not in the moment we're in.

00:43:53.000 I think there might have been points in our history where that was true.

00:43:55.000 But even if you think about this issue of taking on the administrative state...

00:44:01.000 It's hard.

00:44:02.000 I think that that's something that's a false belief to think that let's just take the FBI, which, by the way, this isn't a partisan point.

00:44:08.000 This is the same FBI that went after Martin Luther King with really unjust threats based on incorrectly collected tapes threatening to commit suicide.

00:44:19.000 That same FBI is now going after political opponents of a different persuasion, parents who show up at school board meetings calling them and terming them domestic terrorists or otherwise.

00:44:28.000 Yeah.

00:44:29.000 It's an institution that fundamentally, I believe, in its very system, its organization, its culture, was designed to be corrupt.

00:44:38.000 Still the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI that people walk into.

00:44:41.000 So some Republicans, I think, have appropriate frustration with this institution today, but say, we're going to fire Christopher Wray, who's the current, you know, head of the FBI. Pretending like that's going to solve the problem, when in fact it's part of the cultural rot in an organization that's comprised, here's the tough part about it, of many good people.

00:45:03.000 Yes.

00:45:03.000 So if you try to, it's kind of the systemic racism debate backwards, right?

00:45:07.000 If you try to pin it to individual action, you're missing the point.

00:45:11.000 Yeah.

00:45:11.000 Because it's actually the system that's broken.

00:45:14.000 And I view it differently in the other context.

00:45:17.000 But here, in the context of the administrative state, I view it, individual action is not the problem.

00:45:21.000 It's actually the failure of the system as a whole, which means you need non-incremental change to accomplish, which means anybody who thinks that, okay, we're going to get to that destination, but we're going to get there incrementally, They don't know they're making a false promise, but it's a false promise because you're never gonna actually get there when the system reacts.

00:45:37.000 That machine, every time it's like an immune system, you sort of attack it a little bit.

00:45:42.000 It compensates for that wound and heals with a scar, which is worse than the original thing.

00:45:49.000 And so that's why I would say, take the risk of overshooting.

00:45:53.000 Eviscerate the whole thing.

00:45:55.000 And then, if we've overshot, fine, we will narrowly build from scratch that which was missing.

00:46:01.000 And I think that that's an interesting juncture for us right now.

00:46:04.000 I'm definitely representing one view of that in the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

00:46:09.000 And it's extremely important to bring those ideas to the forefront.

00:46:12.000 Yeah.

00:46:12.000 Because it's been really stagnant for a while, right?

00:46:17.000 And I think, again, that's one of the...

00:46:19.000 I've already...

00:46:20.000 I've talked about the inherent advantages I think conservatism has.

00:46:24.000 I think one of the inherent weaknesses is this idea of maintenance of the status quo, right?

00:46:30.000 There's no...

00:46:31.000 Conservatism doesn't...

00:46:32.000 struggles with slogans.

00:46:33.000 Yeah.

00:46:34.000 Right?

00:46:34.000 If you're a progressive, there's slogans, right?

00:46:36.000 Change, right?

00:46:37.000 Change.

00:46:38.000 Yeah, hope it change.

00:46:38.000 Yeah, change, change, change, right?

00:46:41.000 Whereas, you know, if conservatives had a slogan, what would it be?

00:46:43.000 You know, slow down.

00:46:44.000 Slow down, keep things the same, right?

00:46:46.000 Like, it's not really sexy, and it's hard to sell, especially to younger people, because younger people typically want change.

00:46:52.000 But this is the thing that's interesting, and this is why I really like what you're doing, again, because most conservatives also want change, regardless of their age.

00:47:01.000 They might not want it as fast, they might want different changes, or change to happen in different ways, but most people do actually...

00:47:08.000 Want progress.

00:47:10.000 Yeah, they want progress.

00:47:12.000 I think there's a misnomer even in the terms.

00:47:15.000 People have this idea that conservatives don't want anything to be different or don't want to move forward in any way.

00:47:22.000 That's absolutely not true.

00:47:24.000 But you don't want to blow up the things that are functioning well You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:47:30.000 You don't want to just abolish every social, cultural, traditional idea that's existed and that has been serving humanity as a whole well for a long period of time.

00:47:41.000 Whereas the more progressive approach, you know, at least in modern times, it's way more reckless than that.

00:47:45.000 That's right.

00:47:45.000 It's change for change's sake.

00:47:49.000 Right.

00:47:49.000 Let's just abolish that.

00:47:51.000 Let's blow this up. 0.84

00:47:52.000 Do we really only need two genders? 1.00

00:47:53.000 Why don't we just have infinite?

00:47:55.000 Do we even need the police?

00:47:57.000 Do we need law and order?

00:47:59.000 It even shows up in smaller and more boring contexts, like when the Democrat movement sort of said we're going to get rid of the early primary voting states.

00:48:07.000 I don't know if you're familiar with how the presidential process plays out, but the tradition was due to Iowa and then New Hampshire.

00:48:13.000 No one did it in last year.

00:48:14.000 They just broke up, woke up and said, hey, we don't need to do it that way.

00:48:17.000 Yeah.

00:48:18.000 And they changed it.

00:48:19.000 I picked this example because it's a relatively in the scheme of things to most people, a boring example.

00:48:24.000 But it's the attitude of just saying, hey, I'm not going to give the presumption to the status quo.

00:48:29.000 I'm just going to say, if I feel like waking up on a given day and feel like it should be done differently, boom, it's going to be done differently.

00:48:34.000 Change for change's sake.

00:48:35.000 Mm-hmm.

00:48:36.000 And I agree with you.

00:48:37.000 I think that's where the content is different from the approach that I want to take with grounded and conservative values is to say, no, there's a reason we need to make that change.

00:48:46.000 But if we need to make that change and we make it just incrementally, the system is built to stop that incremental change in its tracks such that that becomes an illusion.

00:48:55.000 Which I think is an interesting crossroads for the conservative movement today is are we all willing to adopt the quantum leap approaches that the progressive movement brings, but with a vision of either the wrong destination or none at all.

00:49:08.000 But to take that method and learn something from that method and say, that's what we're actually going to adopt.

00:49:13.000 For driving change of the right kind towards a destination that we know is worth pursuing.

00:49:18.000 Yes.

00:49:19.000 I think that's the moment we find ourselves there.

00:49:20.000 It is.

00:49:21.000 You know, and it's a matter of communication.

00:49:25.000 It's a matter of communication.

00:49:26.000 It's a matter of selling a vision, not in a sort of fake way.

00:49:34.000 Yeah.

00:49:35.000 Because the truth is, again, regardless of where, I think it's important for people to also remember, because this gets forgotten, is that most people are not, you know, right or left.

00:49:45.000 Vast majority of the population, probably at least 60 to 70 percent of people are somewhere in the middle, you know, pretty centrist, bit conservative leaning, bit more liberal leaning, whatever.

00:49:54.000 But there's like the majority of people in the USA and in any country are hovering around that middle of the normal distribution and they can be They're persuadable, right?

00:50:03.000 Especially if it's the right candidate, right policies and so on.

00:50:06.000 And I think when it comes to the vision, people's visions, yes, there are, you know, there is a 10% on this side, there is a 10% on this side who has like a very, have a very different view for what the vision should be, right?

00:50:19.000 But the majority of people want the same basic things.

00:50:24.000 This is the thing, like all around the world, this is something I really learned, whether I'm in Saudi Arabia, or I'm in Qatar, or I'm in South Africa, or I'm in Nigeria, or I'm in the US or UK, whatever.

00:50:35.000 Most people do want very similar things.

00:50:38.000 And I think the proper role of a government that exists should primarily be to Allow that to, I think, you know, we both agree that the government isn't supposed to do everything, right?

00:50:51.000 It's supposed to be limited.

00:50:52.000 But it should sort of just tick along in the background and you don't notice it too much and things functionally work on an infrastructure level.

00:51:01.000 Immigration is just sort of functioning and taking care of, you know, the police and the fire departments and these things are working.

00:51:08.000 We've got functional roads, whatever.

00:51:09.000 And then, okay, the rest is up to organizations and individuals and private companies and charities and families and all that stuff.

00:51:17.000 We just create this general environment and then you go out there and you pursue your dream, right?

00:51:23.000 We don't do everything for you.

00:51:25.000 And most people are cool with that.

00:51:27.000 Most people want their communities to be safe.

00:51:30.000 People want low crime rates.

00:51:32.000 People want good schools.

00:51:34.000 People do want to get married.

00:51:35.000 People do want to have children. 0.57

00:51:37.000 People shouldn't believe all this propaganda that the vast majority of people in the world, they want it.

00:51:42.000 By far, like 90% plus.

00:51:44.000 People want these things.

00:51:45.000 People want to be able to speak freely.

00:51:47.000 People want to be able to practice their religion and peace.

00:51:51.000 People want these very basic things.

00:51:54.000 So I think oftentimes who will win when it comes to these political things is who can really communicate that and What I find a lot, I think a lot of politicians make the mistake of not connecting the policies with that vision.

00:52:14.000 They're really sort of fixed on a policy and an idea, but they don't do a good job of explaining how this policy leads to the thing that people want.

00:52:24.000 You see what I mean?

00:52:25.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:52:29.000 Big conservative talking point is about the border, especially here in the US. UK is different because it's an island.

00:52:34.000 Immigration is still a big thing, but it's different here.

00:52:36.000 So if you're talking about the border, If someone just says, whether it's build the wall or tighten the border or this or that, most people, if you're into the world of politics and culture and social, you understand the effects of uncontrolled immigration.

00:52:55.000 You know what that leads to downstream.

00:52:58.000 You know the impact on the economy, on employment, on safety, on all of these things, even just how fair or unfair it is.

00:53:08.000 But if you don't, you have to connect the dots for some people.

00:53:11.000 You have to connect the dots for people.

00:53:12.000 You have to let them know, okay, why should you even care about what's happening at the border?

00:53:16.000 How does this affect you?

00:53:17.000 How does this affect the community?

00:53:18.000 How does this affect the country?

00:53:20.000 So I think that when people are promoting their policies, they need to say, okay, we want to do this, but here's how this is going to help you.

00:53:29.000 What I would love, one thing I would love to hear more from conservatives is, not here, not just here, but see done.

00:53:39.000 Is we all...

00:53:40.000 I mean, I talked about this at the YAF National Conservative Student Conference, right?

00:53:44.000 That's where we met.

00:53:45.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:53:46.000 I said, you know, put your hand up if you'd like to get married. 0.97

00:53:48.000 Right?

00:53:49.000 Room of late teens, early 20s.

00:53:51.000 Every single hand goes up.

00:53:53.000 You know, put a hand up if you'd like to have a family one day.

00:53:56.000 Yeah.

00:53:57.000 Put your hand up if you'd like to own a home one day.

00:53:59.000 Put your hand up if you think this is harder to do now than it was in your parents' or grandparents' generation, and every hand goes up.

00:54:07.000 I bet you, yep.

00:54:07.000 Okay, so what are conservatives doing?

00:54:10.000 Every conservative agrees these are good things that people should aspire towards.

00:54:14.000 Inherently good.

00:54:15.000 All else equal, inherently good.

00:54:17.000 Yes, these are all good.

00:54:18.000 But what is being done to make them more possible and more achievable?

00:54:21.000 Because it's hard, right?

00:54:23.000 Or even one step worse than that.

00:54:26.000 What is being done to make these things more difficult?

00:54:29.000 The incentives that the government creates otherwise.

00:54:31.000 And it's actually a funny and interesting moment where if you ask young people that today, 20 years ago, it might have been heterodox to say no.

00:54:41.000 No, I don't want that.

00:54:42.000 Whereas today, if you want to be heterodox or you want to stick it to the man or be a hippie, if you're a young person, try saying you want to marry someone, maybe even of the opposite sex, and have children, and stay married, and pursue an education, and value that, and maybe Have instill in them a faith in God and instill in them a basic belief in the country they live in and being patriotic towards that country.

00:55:07.000 Boy, is that sticking it to the system.

00:55:09.000 That is heterodox.

00:55:10.000 And so it's a promising moment the way I see it is you have at once amongst young people today the opportunity to stick it to the system and stand up while doing the thing that most people innately actually want to do and recognize as best for them.

00:55:25.000 Yeah.

00:55:26.000 And I do think that's an opportunity that we have.

00:55:28.000 I think it's a huge opportunity.

00:55:29.000 I'm just thinking about your story even about, I mean, thinking about earlier the tension between traditionally the people who favor one vision.

00:55:38.000 I was talking about the conservative movement in politics, but one vision, who are reluctant to pursue a particular nontraditional method of getting there, the method of progressives, radical change.

00:55:49.000 It's in the apolitical context kind of similar to Your career.

00:55:55.000 I mean, you're talking about truth and positivity.

00:55:57.000 That's usually delivered through mediums that are different than rap or hip-hop.

00:56:04.000 Yes.

00:56:06.000 It's kind of an analogy.

00:56:07.000 I don't know.

00:56:07.000 I feel maybe it's part of why you and I hit it off the first time we spoke is maybe remixing the methodology of delivering substance that doesn't match that method.

00:56:19.000 It's like, you know, if we got one set of fluid, but usually it's delivered through one set of pipes, maybe we got to just build a different set of pipes for that same fluid.

00:56:27.000 100%.

00:56:27.000 And I think that this people are To me, sane liberals and sane conservatives are very close to each other.

00:56:39.000 I think people have an idea because perhaps it's a function of the political party dichotomy that exists in the US with a country of this giant size only having two real big political parties.

00:56:54.000 It creates this artificial binary that you just have the right and the left.

00:56:59.000 Whereas the truth is, like, a left-leaning person who's pretty centered and a right-leaning person who's pretty centered are much closer than they are to people who are on the fringes of either side.

00:57:10.000 And that often gets forgotten when you talk.

00:57:12.000 It's part of why I avoid using the terms the left and the right, because it sounds like it's more polarized than it truly is.

00:57:19.000 And I think that what's good that's happening is both sane liberals and conservatives and libertarians are increasingly seeing the importance of culture.

00:57:28.000 I think it was a massive, massive mistake to just leave culture and art and media and music, just completely leave that for the progressives, just leave that for the far lefties and people.

00:57:41.000 Now people are complaining about the downstream impact of that, but it's like, look, if you abandon these things, then they're just going to be taken over.

00:57:49.000 And you've seen that happen in academia.

00:57:51.000 You've seen it happen in big tech and arts and music and Hollywood, all of these things.

00:57:56.000 And I think it's great that now you are seeing On an independent level and on a small company level, you're seeing this rise of new types of media from music, comic books, acting, movies, all of that stuff.

00:58:12.000 I think it's fantastic.

00:58:13.000 So I think we're at the very early stages of, I don't even know the right term to use for it, but like a sort of We're moving into an increasingly multipolar world, but even a multipolar media and multipolar culture.

00:58:29.000 Speaking of which, a very tactical question on that.

00:58:32.000 Sure.

00:58:32.000 So take that to the next level.

00:58:33.000 Are you on TikTok?

00:58:35.000 No, it's the one that I don't use.

00:58:37.000 Yeah.

00:58:38.000 So I just joined it recently on the premise of actually, you know, it has its faults, no doubt about it.

00:58:44.000 But A, someone's not going to get to the position I want to get to to fix it without actually being successful.

00:58:49.000 But B, that's where it is a different medium, where a lot of people are.

00:58:53.000 Why not?

00:58:54.000 I mean, I was persuaded of it, so I get it.

00:58:56.000 Yeah, I've had people trying to get me on it since it was called Musically.

00:58:59.000 Oh, is it called that?

00:59:00.000 I have no idea.

00:59:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:59:01.000 So before it was even TikTok.

00:59:03.000 I mean, I think it's...

00:59:05.000 At its core, I think it's a...

00:59:06.000 I literally believe it's a Chinese weapon.

00:59:10.000 And I don't even want to install the app on my phone.

00:59:12.000 I will probably get someone to run one for me.

00:59:16.000 Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm saying.

00:59:17.000 Not on your phone either.

00:59:18.000 Yeah, I don't even install it on my phone.

00:59:20.000 The reality is...

00:59:22.000 I mean, this is a whole discussion for another day.

00:59:23.000 Much of American capitalism as it exists today...

00:59:28.000 Has been deputized into being a Chinese weapon, too.

00:59:31.000 I mean, Airbnb turns over user data of US users to China as a condition for doing business in China.

00:59:38.000 So I share that concern.

00:59:40.000 But on the other hand, if we're going to drive change, how do we use the methods that we have to get to that destination we want to get to?

00:59:48.000 It's another different version of the methodology needed to get to where you want to go.

00:59:51.000 For sure.

00:59:52.000 I know I have videos.

00:59:54.000 There's clips of me on there.

00:59:55.000 I bet.

00:59:56.000 So I don't actually have my own account.

00:59:57.000 That's kind of how I found out about it, too.

00:59:58.000 I don't have my own account, but, you know, I will probably outsource that to somebody.

01:00:04.000 Yeah.

01:00:05.000 That's just a one-off.

01:00:05.000 When you were talking about the methods and the new media, it's how far, how far.

01:00:09.000 Or do you take that down the chain?

01:00:09.000 Yeah, but, you know, it's exciting.

01:00:11.000 I think there is so much threat, and there's so many concerns that people have, but with all that does come massive, massive opportunity.

01:00:19.000 And I think that people need to see that.

01:00:21.000 I think that people need to be very careful to not get caught up in the black pill, doomsday mindset of, everything's falling, the entire nation, the entire world is crumbling, and the globalists this and this.

01:00:32.000 And, you know, I'm increasingly seeing more right-leaning people becoming Turning into all of the things that's made the left side of the aisle so off-putting over the past 10 or 15 years, they're oftentimes turning into that.

01:00:51.000 And I understand where it's coming from, and I understand the demoralization, but I think people need to be very, very, very careful With all of that, I'm even seeing a rise in identity politics popping up on the right in some concerning ways.

01:01:07.000 That's been one of my biggest criticisms of the left side of the aisle for the past decade is just this continuous obsession with race and gender.

01:01:16.000 I do think that we would do well to remember maybe T.S. Eliot here.

01:01:21.000 This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

01:01:27.000 The way the culture war may end is, and I'm intent to make sure that it doesn't, but I worry about it, is that each side borrows the methods of the other in a way that you're still left fighting without realizing that there's not really that much of a difference in what you're actually fighting for.

01:01:45.000 In some ways, different than what you said, but there are other ways in which, as my second book was about this too, is I worry about Two sides fighting each other, adopting the methods of the other.

01:01:58.000 It's sort of back to when you were fighting terrorism in the early 2000s here in the West.

01:02:04.000 If you're willing to go after innocent families and children to defeat the terrorists, What distinguishes you from them, right?

01:02:11.000 And I think the same question comes up and surfaces itself now in the modern political-cultural world where we have to remember why we're doing what we're doing without losing what we're fighting for in the process.

01:02:22.000 Absolutely, man.

01:02:23.000 And, you know, having principles is always difficult.

01:02:26.000 Yeah.

01:02:27.000 Right?

01:02:28.000 It's the right thing to do, but taking that by...

01:02:31.000 I can understand why some people have The by any means necessary type of approach.

01:02:38.000 But once you do that, I think you lose your own soul.

01:02:41.000 You lose your own values, your own principles. 1.00

01:02:43.000 You become a hypocrite. 1.00

01:02:44.000 You become the thing that you initially fought to set out against. 1.00

01:02:47.000 That's a big thing that's happened throughout the left, right?

01:02:51.000 The anti-racists have become racist. 0.59

01:02:52.000 The anti-fascists have become fascist and violent, right? 0.99

01:02:56.000 The feminists have become... 1.00

01:02:57.000 You're saying that can go in both directions?

01:02:59.000 It can go in both directions.

01:03:01.000 The feminists have become either man-haters or throwing women themselves under the bus and not even knowing what a woman is, right? 1.00

01:03:11.000 So...

01:03:11.000 I had a tweet a couple years ago go very viral where I said, any social movement without a clearly defined finish line will eventually end up becoming what it's set to fight out against.

01:03:25.000 And that's the overcorrection that's been happening.

01:03:27.000 So what I would love to see is just a, and I think this is happening, I think the pendulum has started to return back, just coming back to Just common sense and reality and maturity, not just the mudslinging and the fighting and whatever. 0.87

01:03:43.000 And again, to give you props, man, I love the fact that you will talk to anybody.

01:03:49.000 There's been too much of the, okay, we're just going to stay in our little silo here. 0.90

01:03:54.000 Stay in our little silo there and point at the other one and go, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad. 0.95

01:03:58.000 And it's goofy and it's immature. 0.95

01:04:00.000 So good on you for breaking that.

01:04:02.000 Thank you for being here, man.

01:04:04.000 It's good seeing you, and I feel I'm going to be talking for a long time to come.

01:04:07.000 I appreciate it, man.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - October 03, 2023

The Anti-Racists Have Become Racist - ZUBY | The TRUTH Podcast #40

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript